hello!

the last few weeks have been crunchy for me. how have they felt for you?

often, it's not that i don't know the way through or the answer, it's that some part of me doesn't like the answer or the way, and so i resist. i try to make it "make sense," try to fit into something that exists already, something more familiar.

this never works. i just spin my wheels, expend energy in a place i know, until i'm ready to take steps towards what i don't know: make wise choice, wise change.

c r e a t i v e r e s p o n s e, the workshop series i'm offering, needs to start a week later, needs to start an hour earlier.

i wish i knew "WHY."

(i get stuck in "why?" it's a place i hide so i can stay confounded, stuck, instead of choosing to move.)

but when i get a gut sense, when knowing comes in, i seldom know why. and the practice is to trust it, and to trust myself to revise when and as needed.

with this series, i had sent an announcement out already, i had made a "plan" and i could feel myself stomping around white-knuckled clinging to "the plan" even as guides, spirit, the universe, the future (multitudes come by many names) was gently and repeatedly saying: no baby, that's not the plan.

this week, the child we raise gave us valentines made of whatever paper they could find, glue and glitter. mine was made with a dusky rose colored glitter and my partner's was a bright green glob splattered across origami instructions i didn't know we had.

the red and pink construction paper hearts they brought home from school were also beautiful but there was no comparing them to the no-plan wildly abundant speedy gesture splashing glitter cards that the child made on their own.

i love teaching and facilitating spaces for people to engage their own no-plan feel-into-it glitter blobs. i love witnessing the ways groups become friends, become communities of care around creative practice. and i love teaching outside of the institution because i feel less pressure to leave behind my own real guideposts: tarot, astrology, the mystics, movement, breath, meditation--all that is unsanctioned by normative (read: patriarchal) forms of knowing.

and too, there is something not quite aligned for me about doing capitalism in this way: asking communities i love to pay out of pocket for the work i want to share, posting on social media, doing marketing, doing hustle. i do not see them clearly yet but i am feeling into new ways.

so there is a week left to join this series. and i hope if you feel called to be in the group but felt it was outside your means that you will let me know. we start next week at 10am, an hour earlier than was the "plan"--because i am working on prioritizing connecting and relating to gift, which sometimes means you got to scrap the plans.

with love,
litia

3 beautiful resources in the world that helped me REVISE, RETHINK, get it "wrong" and TRY AGAIN:

1. Paco de Leon is the author of Finance For The People and a beautiful newsletter they call The Nerdletter. Last week, they wrote about signaling wealth in order to be treated more like a human being. This is an excerpt and you can sign up for the newsletter here:

I had an epiphany about my behavior over the last few years that’s sobering and a little depressing. Sometimes I pay people to treat me with respect because I don’t always get it in the real world. When I choose a more expensive hotel over a cheaper one, upgrade a flight, or go to a more expensive restaurant, yes, I’m paying for quality. But I also expect to be treated kindly. I’m paying a premium with the expectation that others will hide their classism, racism, homophobia, their allegiance to the patriarchy. I’m paying to be cared for in a world that has thrown people like me away.

2. Last year, Kiese Laymon and Tressie McMillan Cottom had this beautiful conversation about revision: how important it is to live one's ethics as a live and changing Thing, in creative practice as well as all other parts of a life...and how much courage it takes to revise.

3. This week I got to talk with the incredible artist Anna Sew Hoy about her upcoming exhibition that opens in March at SF MOMA. She shared how her methodology has to make space for error or getting it "wrong" because when you work with clay, it's not possible to know exactly how fire in the kiln will affect it. She explained that it's not that she is not attached or doesn't feel devastated when something doesn't work as she had planned, but that there is a deeper understanding a commitment to returning to the unknown, to trying again, and to discerning new ways of moving precisely from what has "not worked"--that all of this is the practice.
¡Happy Jupiter Day!

scrap the plans! (there's still time)